Deep Ganguli leads the team at Anthropic tasked with studying how Claude affects the labor market. He does not pretend the irony is lost on him. "It's a real tension. I think about this all the time," he said. "It feels like we might be speaking out of both sides of our mouths."
As "Hvylya" reports, citing a TIME investigation, CEO Dario Amodei has warned that AI could displace half of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. He urged the government and other AI companies to stop "sugar-coating" the impact. Wall Street's reaction to Anthropic's own product launches - one release erased $300 billion from software companies' market value - suggests investors take the threat seriously.
Amodei went further in a recent essay, describing a scenario where displaced workers form a permanent economic underclass. "It is not clear where these people will go or what they will do," he wrote, adding that he was concerned they "could form an unemployed or very-low-wage 'underclass.'" The warning came from the CEO of a company whose annualized revenue from its coding tool alone has surpassed $2.5 billion - revenue generated precisely by automating the kind of work Amodei says is at risk.
The company's own trajectory illustrates the dynamic. Claude Code, the tool that lets Claude write and execute code like a human programmer, has made Anthropic's own engineers dramatically more productive. Its creator, Boris Cherny, stopped writing his own code entirely. Inside Anthropic, 70% to 90% of the code used to develop future models is now written by Claude. Model releases are separated by weeks, not months.
Ganguli's societal-impacts team continues to study the problem, but the acceleration shows no signs of slowing. Anthropic's leadership has framed the years 2026 to 2030 as the critical window, with models potentially becoming more capable faster than humans can manage them. The company that sounds the loudest alarm about AI's labor disruption remains the one building the tools most likely to cause it.
Also read: "Anti-Social Media": Why ChatGPT and Claude Push Public Opinion Where Populists Don't Want It